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The duty of the Leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition is to oppose. You can look it up in his job title.

By that measure, Tim Hudak is pretty good at his job. The Tory leader opposes everything under the sun — and anything shady.

It’s a thankless job — and not one he sought: Hudak ran to be premier in the last election, not the runner up dispensing perpetual put-downs.

Yet he still seems unreconciled to the results of Oct. 6, 2011, when the Liberals lost their majority. A minority legislature opened up new opportunities. Instead of reflexively opposing, the opposition could be proposing workable compromises that the Liberals couldn’t refuse.

NDP Leader Andrea Horwath quickly got to work making minority government work — not just opposing but proposing. As leader of the third party, she now wields the balance of power and her party punches above its weight. It drove a hard bargain with the minority Liberals on corporate taxes and welfare rates last year, and hopes to again this year.

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Hudak, by contrast, never misses an opportunity to oppose. Instead of influencing government, he is marginalizing himself.

A year ago, he emerged from a special briefing to announce he would oppose the budget. On Tuesday, he listened to the speech from the throne and said it again: Opposed.

By denouncing Premier Kathleen Wynne’s agenda, Hudak has dealt himself out. And surrendered centre stage to the NDP.

On Wednesday, with unwitting symbolism, he left the legislature without stopping to answer questions from reporters — who contented themselves, in his absence, with a news conference from Wynne and comments from Horwath. Another missed opportunity for Hudak to make his mark.

Scheduling aside, his substantive priorities are also puzzling. Kicking off the first question period in four months (after the prorogation interregnum), Hudak castigated the Liberals for not imposing a wage freeze across the public sector.

An oddly-timed crusade. Two years ago the question would have been germane and fair game: Settlements in the public service were far above the zeros targeted by the government, given private sector trends and deficit pressures.

But there’s been a public sector bloodletting over the past year, culminating with wage freezes negotiated under duress in the dying days of Dalton McGuinty’s government: OPSEU, CUPE, college teachers, Catholic teachers, public sector supervisors and doctors. Oh, and wage freezes imposed on public school teachers with Tory support (Hudak’s sole collaboration with the Liberals). So why would Hudak keep goading Wynne to crack down on labour in the wake of a de facto wage freeze?

Hudak does a better job of holding the government to account on other issues. He lamented Wynne’s expansion of cabinet by a remarkable 25 per cent to a bloated 27 ministers. And he is targeting the Liberals’ costly and expedient cancellation of two gas plants.

It’s the kind of opposition politics the Tories are good at. But voters tend not to reward opposition parties merely for being good at opposing — especially if they fail the test of a minority legislature. At election time, they will be looking for a party ready to assume power — or, in a minority, share power.

Hudak, however, has been lurching rightward in recent months, churning out controversial discussion papers. He talks of denuding unions, privatizing public utilities, and getting tough on recipients of student loans or welfare payments.

It plays well with the party base. But it seems a missed opportunity to occupy the centre-right of the political spectrum, which may open up as Wynne’s Liberals compete with New Democrats for the progressive vote.

Can the leader of the opposition repurpose himself, proposing more practical ideas rather than merely opposing? Watch for a Tory policy conference this September, when party veterans will try to dilute those discussion papers to produce a more palatable pre-election campaign platform.

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